Buy an Ikea flat pack home and get £5,000 in benefits!

photo credit: cotaro70s

Home owners everywhere are familiar with the Ikea routine – unpack your box, search the house for a screwdriver and settle down for an afternoon of twiddling before you finally end up with a coffee table.

The Swedish firm began expanding into the housing industry a while ago now, having developed a plan to solve shortages with the BoKlok ’smart home’ brand, essentially extending the affordable flat pack to the housing sector.

Gateshead, northern England, is where the BoKlok invasion first landed in the UK, with the first residents moving in during November last year. But sales have been sluggish due to the credit crunch, says local paper the Journal, with 20 of the 36 homes in the scheme empty.

So, anyone who reserves this Saturday or Sunday and completes before March is getting a huge package of offers – including the likes of bikes, garden extras and tickets for the local Metro system. The first 13 takers will also get a year’s gym membership for two and a family holiday.

Quoted by the Journal, David Bexon, boss of SmartNewHomes.com, said:

“If people are in a position to move they can get some crazy deals.”

UK home builders are not alone in offering some truly weird and wonderful housing incentives to up buyer interest. In Bangalore, India, we’ve had luxury cars and plots of land offered as part of deals and in the US one family sold a miniature model of their home at a real-life size price and included the real thing for free.

But in Britain, the buyer-deal bun fight is approaching new heights. Here’s a quick run-down of what some major UK housing companies are offering at the moment;

-Any buyer going for a Redrow Homes (Eastern) property can get help from the firm with the deposit, stamp duty and other moving costs, and the company will ‘maybe’ take a customer’s existing property in part-exchange.

-George Wimpey is offering five per cent deposits paid for first-time buyers at is Waterside Park new housing project in West Drayton.

-Miller Homes is releasing 642 properties to potential buyers under the Government’s £400 million Homebuy Direct initiative. This enables first-timers and other buyers to take an equity loan of up to 30 per cent of the price, joint-funded by Miller Homes and the government.